September 19, 2012

The Cry Of My Lai (MP3)

The My Lai Massacre was surely the ugliest incident of the entire Vietnam war. The event took place in March 1968 and involved members of the U.S. Army murdering hundreds of unarmed civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Estimates place the number of victims at somewhere between approximately 350 and 500 people, many of them women, children and the elderly.

The awful killings inspired a number of topical country songs about the event, almost all of which, in a position that doesn't seem too defensible in hindsight, defended William Calley, the Leiutenant who ordered the killings.

Ivan Lee's The Cry Of My Lai, however, is an exception in that it offers Calley no support and, in fact, decisively condemns his actions. In case you missed it, this event was the subject of an earlier Beware Of The Blog post, one that included 9 other records about the massacre.

Comments

Despite the fact that this song is contrary to my view of the troops who fought in the war (my dad being one of them), this song has always had a special place in my life. My dad was a studio musician who was hired to play on this record. My mom happened to be there that night with me (I was 9 months old). Ivan Lee thought it would be more powerful to have a baby crying in the background, so I was held up to a mic and allowed to be fussy. So I am the baby on the record.